Forty years later, it’s still being called one of “Hollywood’s top sex scandals of all time.” Ironic since the sex was so boring. Alistair/me; Sam/Delia; Alistair/Alistair’s-idea-of-Delia—whatever couplings were going on at the Knight’s Rest Motel in Taft CA in June of 1973, they didn’t involve grand-passion Taylor-Burton sex, or evil Roman Polanski sex, or even sad Pee-Wee Herman sex.
It was just nothing-better-to-do-in-Taft sex.
Delia wrote a memoir in her later years and Sam hardly got a mention. She called the affair “an unfortunate lapse in judgment.” Alistair didn’t get more than a few lines either. Delia dismissed the turmoil surrounding his death as “a horrible time that’s best forgotten.”
A sentiment all of us would second, I’m sure.
The night Alistair died was pretty much a routine evening, except that his usual fight with Delia escalated into flinging things around the room. I used to make myself crazy wondering what would have happened if I’d called the police instead of Sam when I heard that lamp crash. Officer Odom might have arrived and whisked Alistair off to the hoosegow to cool off, and we all could have gone about our lives, unchanged and unscandalized.
But Alistair’s death changed us all.
Sam’s star wattage kept him going for a few more years, but his marriage exploded with great drama. As did Delia’s. Her film career pretty much vaporized, too.
There’s a contingent of celebrity-mavens who think Sam killed Alistair when he gave him that beating—or at least that Alistair died of Sam-inflicted wounds. I think Sam probably did punch Alistair out when he found him scurrying out of Delia’s room that night—but the pounding didn’t kill him. The autopsy report made that pretty clear.
A fiction still exists in some British tabloids that Delia was to blame, which is completely unfair. Her Mandrax tablets might possibly have done the job, but that was hardly her fault since Alistair stole them.
Besides, Coroner Aram Krikorian insisted until his dying day that Alistair’s body didn’t have enough Mandrax in him to kill a rodent.
In spite of that, most people persist in calling it suicide. That’s what it said in a recent HuffPo article about Hollywood sex scandals. I suppose the mistake may be forgiven. With Alistair’s history, suicide did look like the obvious thing, but who takes two little pills if he wants to kill himself—or even if he wants to appear to want to kill himself?
All those other suicide attempts were grand gestures, which did enough damage to land him in a hospital. Those two Mandrax tablets were only intended for sleep, I’m sure of it.
Of course, the hard-core scandalmongers love to keep hinting at premeditated murder. Officer Odom—or I should say Chief Odom—loves to stir up drama with his murder theory. And he’s never let go of his suspicion that “the nanny” was the culprit. Every so often somebody interviews him for one of those unsolved-mystery TV shows, and he always brings up the strange round bruise on the back of Alistair’s head. Then he goes into his little routine about how he always looks at the suspect with the strongest motive and the easiest access.
“The nanny,” he always says. “That girl had motive and access. I know she did it.” Luckily, he never actually mentions me by name. I’m sure his television interviewers know better than to anger a Conway. Some things don’t change
But Mr. Aram Krikorian went to his grave insisting it was an accident. “Physical evidence doesn’t lie,” he’d always say. “The man died of a brain injury sustained in an accidental fall.
And he was right. As I rode my Pan Am flight back to Boston on that night in 1973, staring into my two plastic glasses of champagne, I remembered two other champagne glasses—from the night I first met Alistair.
And in one clear brain-flash, I knew exactly how Alistair had died.
This is what I’m pretty sure happened:
Still furious at Delia, Alistair got me to let him into her room to get the Mandrax. I’m sure this was partly motivated by a genuine need for something strong to medicate the pain caused by Sam’s nose-punching.
He would have gone directly to her medicine cabinet and popped a couple of Mandrax tablets. But the cabinet might have been something of a surprise. I’d gone for some Pepto Bismol for Pandora a couple of days before, and I couldn’t believe the stuff in there. Uppers, downers, antidepressants, anti-anxiety tablets—a regular pharmacopoeia.
I didn’t judge her for it—I figured she probably needed all that to cope with having Alistair in her life for the last year. But it was a shock. She never seemed drugged.
Alistair, on the other hand, was nothing if not judgmental. And right there in front of him was evidence that Delia was on drugs. He was already in high dudgeon about Delia’s canoodling with Sam—and no doubt infuriated by the pounding he’d got—and now he had fuel to turn his anger into righteous fury.
I imagine he decided to park himself in her room and lie in wait in order to confront her about her dissolute ways.
So there he sat, his rage simmering. The clock ticked. No Delia. But by that time the Mandrax would have started to work its magic. He would have begun to feel very sleepy.
So that’s when I think he went into default mode—he decided to Gaslight Delia. He climbed up on the toilet seat to hide the bottle of Mandrax on top of the medicine cabinet the way he had with my cigarettes in Mayfair.
And as he did with Punch’s grass the night we met—the night we’d shared those two glasses of champagne in Punch’s bathroom.
So Alistair was simply being Alistair—a little boy trying to manipulate the grown-ups whose addictions caused him pain. Beat up and drugged, he climbed up on the toilet seat to perform his old trick.
But he was under the influence of a powerful muscle relaxant. A little dizziness, maybe a slip of the foot, and down he went.
If he fell backward, his head could have hit the towel rack behind him, enough to bruise the back of his head on the ball-shaped end of the rack. I remember noticing the fixtures in the bathrooms seemed to be original—of a bulbous nineteen-thirties style that didn’t fit with the thick square shapes of the nineteen seventies additions.
After hitting his head, he would have tried to right himself, lurching forward toward the bathroom sink, only to fall against it, on his face—hard. Dizzy from the first blow, with drug-relaxed muscles, he could have fallen hard enough to cause those face bruises and the concussion that killed him.
In other words, Gaslighting killed Alistair Milbourne.
I saw the whole scenario in my head as I stared at the champagne. Before I could stop myself, I realized I’d laughed out loud. The stewardess who had given me the extra glass was passing by with her cart, so I took a big gulp and tried to look as if I was having a happy little personal party.
“Sounds like you’re feeling better, hon,” she said. “Nothing like a little bubbly to perk you up.” She winked and put another glass on my tray. “I figure you need it. What a nasty business. It’s the little girl I feel sorry for. Imagine being mixed up in a sex scandal when you’re only five years old.”
OK. She’d recognized me. I wondered if everybody else had too. I downed more champagne, imagining stares from everybody who walked down the aisle. I was a freak. A scandalous freak. Maybe a murderer.
What made it all so horrible and ironic was that I had actually killed somebody: I’d killed Count Santa Claus—a man like Alistair in so many ways.
I had the awful thought that maybe I’d killed them both. After all, I was the one who let Alistair into Delia’s room to do the Gaslighting. Tears started to sting again as I slipped into a drunken groggy sleep, dreaming of those damned pink pigs. And Beefeater bottles coming out of the earth like zombies.
Half asleep, with the beginnings of a hangover, I was feeling like something that belonged in a grave myself by the time I landed at Logan Airport. It was nearly nine in the evening. All I wanted was a bed, but I had no idea where I was going to find one. In my rush to get out of Taft, I hadn’t really contemplated this. I had no place to live. No idea where my father was. No possessions except what I was carrying. There was precious little money in my checking account. I could afford a hotel room for a few nights, but after that…I had no idea.
I tried to fight the panic that shot through me by reminding myself I was damned lucky to have survived the ordeal and doubly lucky there were no paparazzi waiting to greet me.
But when I went to the carousel to fetch my much-battered backpack, I heard someone shout my name.
Damn. The tabloids had found me after all. They had to get one more shot of the killer nanny. I put my head down and pretended not to hear.
I walked quickly, pushing into the crowd, but the paparazzo kept following me. I cringed as his hand came down on my shoulder. I wouldn’t turn for his damned photo. It would be hideous, with my makeup all streaked from crying, and puffy from travel and too much champagne.
“Nicky. It’s me. I’ve come to take you to Kennebunkport.”
I whirled around and saw Grayson Bell. Not the hippie Grayson Bell, or the snarky-student Grayson Bell, but a nice-looking guy wearing a sport coat and khakis.
He gave me a hug. “You must have been through hell. I hope you’re OK.”
He took my suitcase and led me out to his brand new Audi. As we idled in line waiting to exit the parking lot, he reached over and squeezed my hand.
“You saved my life, Nicky. Con’s too. I can’t tell you how happy I am now that Con has taken me back.”
My addled brain couldn’t process this information.
“I saved your life? How?” The night was drizzly and cool for July. I opened a window to the soothing moisture. So lovely after the desert heat.
“The letter, Nicky. That letter you wrote last September. You explained what happened with the Crown Royal. Uncle Con called my dad and my dad wired me to get home immediately because I had my job back. My family forgave me. Con forgave me. I have a job. A great apartment. A lover. All thanks to you.”
Of course his life fell apart in the first place because of me and my relationship with Alistair, but this wasn’t the time to remind him of that.
“A lover—you mean you’re out of the closet? You and Uncle Con? What about Aunt Livy?”
A look of terror crossed Grayson’s face. “Oh god, no. No. We don’t talk about it. In fact, she’ll probably start trying to set us up—you and me—since I think Wogs has finally got her mother to understand that she and Judy aren’t just a “phase.”
“Does she know what Alistair did to you?”
“I doubt it. Please don’t say anything—OK?”
I nodded. Even dead, Alistair was still perpetrating secrets, lies and scandals.